I mean, the reason it is staying so cold in the USA at least far into spring might be cause by the warming of the north. Which in turn has changed the gulf stream and pushed the colder northern air farther south. As some people speculate.

This type of signal processing technology is commonly used in several different vendors' COTS or semi-custom boards and subsystems, for military and NSA-style security apps. The high-powered stuff is, of course, especially pricey.

Cabe, can you clarify that sentence? Are you saying that global warming might be caused by "a southern drifting cold air", or the opposite? What is "a southern drifting cold air" and where is it on the globe?

Chuck, The underlying video appliance technology can be used by any number of applications, and can be deployed as an embedded system or operate standalone. It combines advanced video processing with networking using COTS technology, so there are lots of potential apps.

I kept hearing about these capabilities, and by implication their applications, from the makers of very high-performance audio and video processing hardware used by "the government." Every time I'd ask about the apps for a new product, company spokespeople would say things like "unnamed government agencies," which I eventually learned meant the NSA as well as the military. It's important to remember that "the government" is not monolithic, consists of multiple agencies, and is staffed by multiple people, many of whom (agencies and individuals) have no idea what the others are doing.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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